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CESCA Boosts Scientific Research with SGI® Altix® UV

World's Fastest Supercomputer to Aid Researchers in Medical, Environmental Research and Astronomy with Extreme Speed and Scalability

Reading, UK — October 28, 2010 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that the CESCA (Catalonia Supercomputing Centre) has selected SGI Altix UV 1000 for its high performance computing (HPC) system to enable advanced scientific research in the areas of medical and environmental research, and astronomy.

CESCA required an HPC system with a floating point of at least 10 Tflop/s, homogeneous architecture, and breakthrough energy efficiency and extreme scalability in cores, main memory and disk space. SGI's Altix UV 1000 easily met these requirements, and provided a unique shared memory system that can be split in logic partitions and scale to hundreds of thousands of computing cores and PB of memory.

"We selected SGI's Altix UV 1000 because of the optimum benchmark results that could be delivered, and because a high-capacity nodes environment is more convenient for the kind of application executed by our users," said Miquel Huguet, director of CESCA. "It is an HPC system that is one step ahead in the consolidation and scalablity of computing services for the research community."

CESCA researchers will use SGI's Altix UV on complex calculations to better understand mechanisms of the respiratory system; to find therapies that prevent the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from entering the cells of an organism; to find a way to weaken the agent that causes tuberculosis; and to better control radiation doses provided to patients in CAT (computerised axial tomography) examinations.

SGI's Altix UV will also aid in their study of molecular magnetic properties with technology applications such as the storage of information at a molecular level, or the development of more efficient synthetic processes and environmental compliance studying organometallic catalysts. It will also allow the study of space-time to increase knowledge of solar storms and other phenomenon that alter the geospace in order to develop applications that allow accurate predictions, and reduce the effects on interplanetarium space, the atmosphere and the Earth.

CESCA's Altix® UV 1000 consists of 224 processors, each with six cores, at 2.67 GHz., 6.14TB of main memory and 112TB of disk memory. The system, with a total of 1,344 cores, reaches a peak performance of 14.3 Tflop/s.

SGI Altix UV offers a wide range of applications for handling huge amounts of data. With its open x86 architecture based on the latest Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series, it allows installation, without modification, of both Novell® SUSE® and Red Hat® Linux® operating systems, achieving maximum processor performance benefits and scalability.

"The choice of SGI Altix UV 1000 by one of the most important research centers in Spain shows the extraordinary computing and storage capabilities that these HPC systems offer to institutions such as CESCA," said Rod Evans, vice president of SGI EMEA. "Altix UV 1000 provides CESCA with the guaranteed computing power it needs to carry out its research activities. We are very proud to strengthen our relationship with an organization with the prestige and research quality of CESCA."

About CESCA (Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya)
The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) is a public consortium created in 1991 which is integrated by the Generalitat de Catalunya, Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca i la Innovació (FCRI), nine Catalan universities (de Barcelona, Autònoma de Barcelona, Politècnica de Catalunya, Pompeu Fabra, de Girona, Rovira i Virgili, de Lleida, Oberta de Catalunya and Ramon Llull), and the Consell Superior d'investigacions Científiques (CSIC). In 2000, it was recognized as a scientific and technical singular facility (ICTS, in Spanish) by the Ministry of Sciencie and Innovation.

The fundamental objective of the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) is to manage infrastructures based on information and communication technologies (e-infrastructures), in order to provide support to universities and research, based on five activity areas: communications networks; portals and repositories for university information; scientific and academic computing and data-storage systems; promotion of the use and benefits of these technologies; and operation and maintenance of the entire Centre infrastructure.

About SGI
SGI, a trusted leader in technical computing, is focused on helping customers solve their most demanding business and technology challenges. Visit www.sgi.com for more information.